“This is a three-headed operation,” said one former official, setting out the case, based on the intelligence: Firstly, hackers steal damaging emails from senior Democrats. Secondly, the stories based on this hacked information appear on Twitter and Facebook, posted by thousands of automated “bots”, then on Russia’s English-language outlets, RT and Sputnik, then right-wing US “news” sites such as Infowars and Breitbart, then Fox and the mainstream media. Thirdly, Russia downloads the online voter rolls.

The voter rolls are said to fit into this because of “microtargeting”. Using email, Facebook and Twitter, political advertising can be tailored very precisely: individual messaging for individual voters.

“You are stealing the stuff and pushing it back into the US body politic,” said the former official, “you know where to target that stuff when you’re pushing it back.”This would take co-operation with the Trump campaign, it is claimed.

Of course the last sentence is critical. It ties in to the testimony today of former FBI special agent Clint Watts who discussed Russia’s “active measures,” a technique “dating back to the days of the KGB and the Cold War of dispensing disinformation and propaganda in order to influence events within another country, particularly the United States.” Watts said that the reason Putin’s efforts were so prevalent and effective in the 2016 presidential election is simple – because “the Commander-in-Chief has used Russian active measures at times, against his opponents.”[/b]